More news of labor unrest and unemployment in China leaves me with the constant question of whether this is significant or just the usual state of events that we happen to see at this moment:
An estimated 26 million desperately poor rural Chinese are jobless after pinning their hopes on factory jobs that dried up due to the global economic slowdown, an official said Monday, noting that widespread unemployment could threaten the country's social stability.
I also keep in mind that the very fact that there is publicity could be a factor in changing what are isolated and "normal" episodes of protest into a threat to social stability. The Chinese Communist Party's drive to power based on a rural power base is clearly a factor in the rulers' sense of worry. Will that worry become reality?
Russia, too, is taking hits from the financial crisis. And unlike the energy importing West that gets a benefit from plummetting oil prices, Russia feels the pain of this factor:
Subordinates have begun openly to defy Mr Putin, a man whose diktat has inspired fear and awe in the echelons of power for nine years, according to government sources. Meanwhile a rift is emerging between Mr Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, the figurehead whom he groomed as his supposedly pliant successor.
As Russia's economy begins to implode after years of energy-driven growth, Mr Putin is facing the germs of an unexpected power struggle which could hamper his ambition to project Russian might abroad.
Mounting job losses and a collapse in the price of commodities have triggered social unrest on a scale not seen for at least four years, prompting panic among Kremlin officials more accustomed to the political apathy of the Russian people.
The unease was deepened yesterday after thousands of protestors marched through the Pacific port city of Vladivostok and other cities, including Moscow, demanding Mr Putin's resignation for his handling of the flailing Russian economy.
Up to one million Russians are estimated by financial analysts to have lost their jobs over the past two months, and the economy is expected to shrink by up to three per cent this year.
Meanwhile the Russian rouble has been falling steadily against other currencies for months, making it the world's third worst performing currency this year, and industry is disintegrating.
I had wondered if the Medvedev-Putin divide could be exploited and wondered if Russia was done shedding provinces in the aftermath of the Cold War.
And Western Europe too, is feeling the heat:
The peoples of Europe have finally discovered what they signed up to. I do mean "peoples" (plural) because however much political elites may deceive themselves, the populations of the member states of the EU are culturally, historically and economically separate and distinct. And a significant proportion of them are getting very, very angry.
What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.
Meanwhile, demonstrators in Paris and the recalcitrant electorate in Germany are waking up to the consequences of what two generations of European ideologues have thrust upon them: the burden not just of their own economic problems but also the obligation to accept the consequences of their neighbours' debts and failures. Each country is true to its own history in the way it expresses its rage: in France, they take to the streets and throw things at the police, in Germany they threaten the stability of the coalition government, and here, we revive the tradition of wildcat strikes.
But the response from the EU political class is the same to all of these varied manifestations of resistance. Those who protest are being smeared with accusations of foolhardy protectionism or racist nationalism when they are not (not yet, anyway) guilty of either.
I wondered if I should be paying more attention to this unrest. And I've wondered by we should be promoting a Soviet Union Lite in the European Union. The Irish may have saved Europe with their vote if it bought time to see what they've really bought from Brussels.
Will an empire fall apart as a result? Either the EU dying before it gets going at full speed, the Soviet empire continuing its fragmentation, or "China" becoming a geographic term rather than a political expression? Many Chinese futures are possible in that context.
Or it could all die down after unrest or even violence with the status quo largely maintained.
Elites in Peking, Moscow, and Brussels could be sitting on powder kegs of discontent. It all has a 1848 feel to it, no?
